The present invention relates to an on-line terminal management method and apparatus, and more particularly to a terminal management method and apparatus for an information processing system capable of reducing terminal change/maintenance works upon new system generation.
Conventionally, when a new terminal is to be connected to a central computer of an on-line system such as banking systems and securities dealing systems, this new terminal is assigned a fixed terminal address that is written in a predetermined area of a disk of the terminal by using switches or a keyboard. Accordingly if a new terminal is additionally installed or transferred to another location, a system manager is required to check whether an assigned terminal address is the same as any one of the already assigned terminal addresses, and if there any one that matches, the system manager is required to again assign another terminal address not coincident with already assigned terminal addresses.
According to another method as disclosed in, e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication JP-A-61-173549, if a terminal is additionally installed or transferred to another location, the contents of a data table in an auxiliary storage connected to, and collectively managed by, a central computer, are updated. Therefore, it suffices only if the terminal requests the central computer to transfer the information in the data table when necessary. The data table includes therein a terminal attribute, address table, command table and other tables. With this method, although the amount of work necessary for a new system generation is reduced, the work of updating the data table is still required to be carried out by a system manager. Consequently, in adding a new terminal to a local area network (LAN) connected to a central computer or in transferring an already installed terminal to another LAN, it is necessary for a system manager to check whether an assigned terminal address of a terminal to be added or transferred is the same as any one of already assigned terminal addresses, and if there is a matching address, to again assign another terminal address not coincident with already assigned terminal addresses.
With the above-described prior art, a terminal address is assigned to each terminal independently from, and irrelevant to, already assigned terminal addresses. Therefore, a system manager is required to check an assigned terminal address of a terminal to be additionally installed or transferred. In order to avoid a duplicated terminal address, cumbersome manual terminal address assignment together with the setting operations of the terminal address and terminal attribute is required, thereby imposing a large burden on a system manager.